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How To Manage Multiple IT Vendors

Posted on by pumex_admin

Within every company, there is an ecosystem of vendors which add value to the supply chain and provide services outside of the organization’s area of expertise or as an adjunct to their internal staff. This vendor supply chain is often invaluable and helps move the objectives of the organization forward. If you live in a vendor heavy organization, where outsourced projects cross paths, you’ve probably run into the headache of finger-pointing.   When you are up against deadlines and you are managing multiple vendors with distinct project responsibilities that have dependencies on one another, it seems like an impossibility to avoid sometimes. Vendor finger pointing can be “tear your hair out” frustrating because at the end of the day, the project still needs to be completed and if timelines or budgets are being blown, the natural position for many is to try and deflect the blame.

What can be done?

The best way to manage vendor finger pointing is to handle it from the beginning before the project starts. Making sure you have well defined contractual engagements, a clear scope of work, and specific deliverables for each portion of the project, this will go a long way to solving these issues up front. Being able to go back to a document where someone signed on the dotted line is invaluable when disputes arise and trust me, disputes will arise in any project where there is a reliance across vendors.   In circumstances where you were not able to accomplish the above, it becomes imperative to move onto Plan B. Which is to assess the gaps in your vendor management process to alleviate friction. The “just get it done” while easy to say, probably isn’t going to solve the root issue and often only ratchets up the pressure, which often just increases the deflective capacity of the vendors that are failing on their commitments.

Plan B

Our experience tells us that there are a few places you can immediately look and solve issues:

Proper Vendor and Project Management

For large projects with multiple moving pieces that contain dependencies on one another, having a tactical, boots on the ground, Project Manager with the capability to make decisions is absolutely key. Your PM should have cross-project assignments and the authority, responsibility, and accountability for each project segment. If your PM doesn’t have the authority to make decisions, be held accountable for their decisions, and the responsibility for overall project success, then you are hamstringing them and hurting their ability to effectively manage the project. For the very large projects, either having a PMO or following some kind of defined project management framework like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for the Enterprise) will be key to ensure your vendors are staying on track and managing those relationships. In line with a good Project Manager, having a proper Business Analyst, whether provided by one of the vendors or internal to your staff will go a long way in ensuring project requirements and user stories are properly documented and communicated to the appropriate teams. But this is a function that can be handled by multiple roles and is a nice to have in comparison to the right project management.

Choosing a Lead Vendor

Usually, when the project isn’t going quite as planned, there will be a vendor that distinguishes themselves and continues to earn your trust. Don’t be afraid to rely heavily on that vendor, consolidate work, or give them a lead role in the production. These types of vendors have one goal, which is project completion. You will recognize them because they will take on leadership roles without being asked, they will attempt to help you manage the project more efficiently and try to help you deliver project areas that may be outside of their scope. When something goes wrong, these vendors come to you with facts and solutions, they don’t point fingers or allow emotions to cloud their judgment. The best possible situation for a vendor you wish to take the lead would be to consolidate work to them. If they are succeeding, it’s because their internal processes and are sound, they have the right people in place on the team, and they are success oriented. If consolidating work isn’t a possibility, then consider placing them as the prime and arrange other vendors as subs on the contract. Finally, the last resort would be to hand them the project management responsibility and make them the gatekeeper for vendor activity. Put this vendor in a leadership role in the eyes of your other vendors and it will go a long way towards helping them, help you manage the overall project. Unless the vendor knows the larger project is doomed to fail, they will be excited to take on this additional role. Often times, as an outsourced provider ourselves, we know that if the client handed more responsibility off to us, we could fix a lot of the issues they are facing in a project. The best vendors want to make their client happy, do good work, and deliver. Trust their track record and you will get the results you are looking for.

What’s The Hype About Progressive Web Apps

Posted on by pumex_admin

You’ve probably heard the term progressive web app thrown around a handful of times in the mobile app world. Some are saying that they’ll replace traditional native apps in the future and become the most common way to enjoy your favorite applications. If you’re unfamiliar with progressive web apps, we have all the information you need to understand exactly why they’re becoming so popular.

Seamless Integration

A progressive web app (PWA) simply put is a browser-based application that looks, feels, and behaves identically to a native mobile app. When developing a PWA the main goal is to create a seamless application that the user won’t be able to tell the difference between their browser and a native app. This leads to the question, why would a company want to gravitate towards progressive web apps instead of developing a native app?

Adaptability

Progressive Web Apps perform the same functions on newer phones as an older phone. PWAs adapt to any type of web browser making them extremely accessible for any user. Most native apps require specific phone updates to access. Though some features might not be available, the PWA will still be fully accessible for anyone with a web browser.

Streamlined Launch

Progressive Web Apps bypass the app stores. Because PWA’s are websites; this allows you to streamline a launch to the public without having to go deal with the numerous restrictions or go through the long approval process to be hosted on Android’s or Apple’s app store.

Faster Development

Progress Web Apps are faster to build and update. PWAs are a single product which adapts to the browser on the device. This saves time when developing, and updating. Once the application is developed it’s easier to manage and update because it is a single code base rather than having to manage multiple versions of a native application.

Shareability

Progressive Web Apps are extremely shareable. Instead of users having to go through the installation process of the app store, PWAs can be shared between users with a simple URL. Since they’re so easy to access and be shared, PWAs are easier to get first-time users by avoiding the app store process. Additionally, when a user visits your website on your mobile browser, they can be prompted to directly download your PWA directly to their phone’s home screen.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see why Progressive Web Apps are growing in popularity. The number of benefits in favor of building a PWA can be overwhelming; in a good way. Rather you want an app that is more accessible or need an app that can go to market ASAP, PWAs can make it happen.

5 Things to Consider When Developing a Mobile App

Posted on by pumex_admin

Every year it becomes more and more apparent that a mobile strategy is becoming a requirement and not an option for businesses. 57% of all U.S. web traffic now comes from smartphones & tablets. The Mobile App market continues to grow like wildfire and shows no signs of slowing down. It has become clear that businesses need to focus on a mobile strategy. The main question is – What strategy do you focus on?   A lot of companies are deciding to develop their own Mobile Apps. Having an app developed for your business provides multiple benefits. Here are 5 ways your business can benefit from a mobile app.

Fix a problem

Chances are you started your business to meet the needs of a customer or solve some sort of problem. The same thought process should be carried into your mobile strategy. When developing a mobile app, the focus should be on having a clear direction. Why are you creating the app? If your mobile app is irrelevant and doesn’t provide a solution and fill a void for its users, then your app will be looked at as irrelevant. 

Value

I heard a quote from Gary Vaynerchuck when he was speaking about the app, Uber – “Uber doesn’t sell transportation. Uber sells time and convenience.” Uber’s value is time and convenience. What is the value that you’ll provide your customers with? A lot of businesses are using mobile apps, which probably includes your competitors, to streamline specific services, and processes for customers, and employees internally. Dunkin Doughnuts, Starbucks, McDonalds… you name it – are all taking advantage of their consumer’s value of time. Even the majority of fast-food restaurants have created apps that allow customers to pre-order and pay before arriving at their locations. Your app needs to provide a value to the user, something that’ll increase the day-to-day of the user.

Simplicity

The user experience is one of the most important things to consider when developing your Mobile App. Apps are dominantly task-oriented and are used to make life simpler. Think about the mobile apps that you use for your day-to-day tasks. How simple is the interface? How many tasks are you able to do in the app? If you use this thought process to reverse engineer yourself as a consumer, you’ll have a better understanding of what you really want in your Mobile App. Users should be able to figure out how to use your mobile app with little to no guidance. If your app is too complicated to figure out, users will not find value in it. All-in-all you want users to recognize the value in your app their first time using it. The saying is true when developing a mobile app – “Less is more.”

Develop your mobile app for IOS and Android

It is vital that you develop your mobile app to work with the 2 major platforms, IOS and Android. Developing with a Cross-Platform Framework allows your app to be used on every major platform, therefore saving you time and cost as opposed to developing for each platform individually.

Create regular updates

In the forever changing digital world we live in, technology is always progressing and evolving. Being able to adapt and react to your user’s needs is extremely important for your Mobile Apps success. To make sure your App stays relevant it needs to be consistently maintained and updated. Updates are needed to ensure that bugs are fixed, content is updated, and your users are continuing to find value in your Mobile App.

Conclusion

A mobile strategy in 2018 is a must. If you do decide to develop a Mobile App remember; have a goal, provide value, keep it simple, and update, update, update. Do you have an idea for your company’s mobile app strategy? At Pumex Computing we specialize in the development of Cross-platform, Hybrid, and Native Mobile Apps. We develop Mobile Apps that will work for your business.

Hybrid Apps Overtaking Native

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There are typically two types of dissenters when it comes to hybrid apps: those who haven’t tried hybrid apps or those who did many years ago.

It doesn’t matter what your current stance on these apps is; the options have evolved tremendously for the better. The hybrid versus native app battle has not only resulted in a tie, but hybrid apps have taken over. The following is an overview of how hybrid apps have progressed and the concerns people have.

Performance

The number one concern people have with hybrid apps is their performance, though this concern really is unfounded now, in 2018. If you look at PhoneGap between the years of 2008 and 2012, then yes, you’re right to be worried.

Luckily, 2013 was a huge turning point for hybrid apps. The release of the iPhone 5 was the start of hybrids being more approachable. Almost 100 percent of the time, hybrid apps work extremely well. Unless your business is interested in creating graphic-heavy, high-performance game apps, hybrid is the way to go. They only need you to update, read, delete, and create data. They also have a little bit of UX sprinkled in there as well. If developing a game is your overall goal, choose native.

It’s been over ten years now since the original version of the iPhone debuted, and mobile device hardware has improved in leaps and bounds. Mobile devices now have processors that are near desktop-quality, 2 to 4 GBs of RAM, and operating systems that have a lot. Each new generation of phone is an improvement from the last.

Besides the hardware improvements, Javascript engines have seen advancements as well. Browser creators are advancing in all elements. They’ve improved single thread performance, increased GPU speeds, used offloading to make faster memory buses and multi-core, and improved multi-threading.

Every few years, Javascript makes major upgrades available which lead to gains of around 4x or more. It’s safe to say that the latest iOS performance will have significant enhancements.

 

Design

A key feature of hybrid apps that give them an advantage over native apps is their ability to build using a single codebase for a vast majority of app platforms. Javascript logic execution has usually worked well. This is in part due to its “write once, run everywhere” mantra. Javascript has features that are consistently available on every mobile platform. Whenever native device functionality is needed, Java has plugins get rid of any platform-specific features.

Achieving consistent design has proven to be extremely difficult due to the huge variety of mobile platform WebViews, the mini web browsers embedded into native apps shells, available. This can most obviously be seen with Android, as they’ve been the most difficult due to the thousands of device and carrier combinations available.

Luckily, the situation has improved. It started with Android 4.4; a change was introduced that would have the Android 4.4 use a Chromium-based WebView. This first step was a good one, but it was only an embedded system browser. Since it was just that, it was only able to get updates through new OS upgrades. These upgrades only happened rarely, depending on the mobile carrier. When Android 5.0 came out, the WebView was taken out of the system. It can be updated now through the Google Play store, ensuring that the users always have the greatest and latest.

Apple’s iOS has proven to be a lot more favorable for those who develop hybrid apps. WebViews has always used Safari, which is Apple’s built-in web browser. With every OS upgrade or patch, CSS and JavaScript come out with new features. Hybrid apps also make it easier to get support for OS versions that are older because Apple users tend to upgrade as soon as the newest OS is available.

Nowadays WebViews has become standardized, allowing you to get consistent layouts across all different displays and screen sizes. Developers of apps can utilize CSS3 flexbox, and other suitable platforms, to make layout designs that are popular for all kinds of mobile devices.

For normal people, who don’t have any background in design, you can easily work with web frameworks. There are resources, like Bootstrap, that are extremely useful for working on mobile and desktop projects. Resources like this put focus on creating responsive, mobile-first projects that are perfect for helping with hybrid apps.

 

Frameworks

Over the past couple of years, there have been many open-source frameworks that have entered and left the app space. The playing field has been leveled in recent years. The most popular choices tend to be Xamarin, NativeScript, React Native, and Ionic.

Xamarin is Microsoft’s framework. It’s a little different than other frameworks. Xamarin has its apps written in C#. For developers that work on .NET, Xamarin is great for mobile development.

NativeScript is created by Telerik and is a unique option. When using NativeScript, you write your apps in plain Javascript, Angular, and TypeScript. It’s then compiled into native code. If you use Telerik’s NativeScript then you have to learn their UI custom mechanism for your layout. This mechanism covers tags (such as “” and “”) which are then converted into a certain native representation. Besides that, you can utilize your existing JavaScript skills.

React Native is a framework that is used by Facebook. Apps on this framework are written in Javascript. It’s unique because it uses native components like “Text” and “View” instead of web components like “span” or “div.” So it produces a real native mobile app. Using this to create your apps is great, but it means that the code can be used only for apps that are mobile.

The fourth framework that is popular is the Ionic framework. Ionic provides you the ability to create apps that cover the most number of platforms, using only a single codebase. This means it can be used for applications for mobile, desktop, web, and progressive web. Ionic apps are created on top of Angular. This means that you need to teach yourself about Angular along with TypeScript.

These four most popular frameworks are great options for those wanting to develop apps. However, they do require you to spend time before you actually feel productive. If you’re not 100 percent certain that you want to go the hybrid way then that’s fine. You can dip your toes in the water and try plain web technology. When you become more comfortable, you can switch over to a framework that you like.

 

Tooling

The last element of app development for hybrid apps is that the number of tools that are available. Those who develop apps can access all kinds of products that will assist with all that you need from cloud management to debugging to continuous integration.

Popular integrated development environments have evolved over the years to support app development that is JavaScript-focused. There are resources that allow developers to debug, write, and test their apps on emulators and devices within their systems.

There are also services like WebStorm by JetBrains, which is an editor that allows you to refactor JavaScript, provides code completion, and is able to detect errors. There are also services that are cross-platform, which you can use to swap between PCs and Mac. This is useful for those who own a MacBook but have a desktop PC.

Each of the frameworks for apps that are listed above has helpful tools to get you started. They each are equipped with their own command-line interface tools that give you useful templates for your app to help you when you start out. They’re truly helpful in the initial setup phases. Many provide local app debugging, JavaScript quality reviews, and end-to-end test execution.

You can utilize many web browser developer tools, which can especially be seen in Google Chrome. They have advanced so much that many web developers use them every day. They have provided a variety of features, including network performance profiling, issue resolution, and JavaScript debugging. The best feature for those interested in developing hybrid apps is probably the ability to test device-specific and responsive viewports. This will give developers an idea of how your app will be displayed on popular devices. It’s down to a perfect science, but it’s still incredibly useful. After all, you can’t realistically be able to test on every type of device there is in existence right now.


The Bottom Line

In the last couple of years, the amount of developers that are in support of hybrid apps is eye-opening. Web developers have shown that they want to create their apps with the utilization of just one codebase. One codebase means that it comes with familiar web technology and tools. Surveys have shown that almost one-third of developers plan to ditch native development completely within the next two years.

Despite the vast improvements to hybrid apps and the technology associated with it, you may still be skeptical about using the hybrid approach. The best way to truly see if it’s the way of the future is to do it yourself. There’s no easier time to jump into the development of hybrid apps. They offer better device performance, advanced tooling, simplified design options, and professional mobile frameworks. They’re the easiest way to transition into today’s new technological world.

Native vs Hybrid vs Cross-Platform

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When choosing to develop between a hybrid, cross platform or native app mobile application there can often times be a lot of confusion. The confusion comes in the different approaches used to get the app developed. The choices for any mobile app development company depends on different factors, such as app features, budget, goals, and target customers. Below we will outline the major approaches—native, cross-platform, and hybrid—to these development apps.

Native Applications

This type of application development simply means developing an app specific to each platform. There are platform specific tools to aid in this process, and these tools enable the functionality of the app. These platform specific tools can be anything from XCode to Objective-C to Swift or C++. For android-based apps, Java or Kotlin are typically used.

 

Pros and Cons to Native Apps

Pros:

  • Stores app resources in the mobile device’s memory, which maximizes OS features.
  • The best tool to use for quality user experience and functionality.
  • iPhone has many resources, reading materials and tools for developing native apps.
  • Native apps have exclusive API’s that can access push notifications, in app purchases, and camera functionality that are usually prohibited in mobile web apps.

Cons:

  • Native apps can get expensive especially if you want the app to be available cross platform.
  • There are also slight variations with the UI on all the different platforms.
  • It is very time consuming to create native applications for both Android and iOS, which can become very costly.
  • Native applications usually have a requirement that only allows the app to define tablets and phones separately. This is non-transferrable between these two platforms.
 

Cross-Platform Applications

This type of app development uses JavaScript. JavaScript enables the application function and also enables CSS and HTML in order to generate design components. Frameworks like Adobe Air and Corona can call native code in order to take advantage of an operating system and any device’s specific functionality like navigation. Cross-platform mobile development is a good choice for users or companies looking for multi-platform functionality.

 

Pros and Cons to Cross-Platform Apps

Pros:

  • Using cross-platform apps offers seamless functionality within the OS.
  • It is easy to use code repeatability, hence offering cost-effective solutions to app development.

Cons:

  • These apps often have a non-native feel to them, offering a less appealing user experience.
  • There is also limited functionality to tap into.
 

Hybrid Application Development for Mobile Devices

The hybrid approach combines all the features of the app developments listed above. Native code is integrated with cross-platform using typical web technologies. These technologies include HTML, CSS and JavaScript. After the app is written, it is then bundled as a native application with an integrated web view. With the new frameworks such as React Native, the hybrid mobile app development approach can be delivered with much less effort while still achieving the same precision as the aforementioned development tools.

 

Pros and Cons of Hybrid Mobile Apps

Pros:

  • With very little modification the same code can be used over different platforms.
  • This in the long term will save money and time.
  • The functionality of hybrid apps is very similar to native apps, making them very user friendly.
  • The content is portable.
  • Developers have an option to deliver the app locally or through a server, meaning the app can be accessed both offline and online.

Cons:

  • Hybrid is a relatively new platform and may not work on all devices.
  • There is not much support for these apps since they are so new, meaning problems can occur, and there is no troubleshooting available.
  • If the app store you are using recognizes the app as a hybrid, it may be denied through the app store.
  • Some vendors are now offering build platforms for these frameworks, meaning that you may have to pay for it.
 

The Verdict

There is no absolute choice for any of these options. It depends mostly on what is best for you or the company or venture being pursued. The best choice usually depends upon which requirements suit you best. If the application you are looking for is very complex in functionality, then native apps are the way to go. If an application that crosses multiple platforms is important, then choosing a cross-platform app is the better choice. If the budget is small and you are looking to optimize mobile experiences, then hybrid may be the way to go.

Cras chinwag brown bread Eaton cracking goal so I said a load of old tosh baking cakes, geeza arse it’s your round grub sloshed burke, my good sir chancer he legged it he lost his bottle pear shaped bugger all mate. The creators of the theme are happy with the response and have vowed to create further themes exploring the same concepts